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Civil Rights Era · Civil Rights

Daisy Bates

c. 1914 – 1999

Arkansas NAACP president and newspaper publisher who guided the Little Rock Nine through the desegregation of Central High School in 1957.

Daisy Bates was a newspaper publisher and the president of the Arkansas NAACP when nine Black students entered Little Rock Central High School in September 1957. She recruited, counseled, and spoke for the students through a crisis that required federal troops to resolve, and she and her husband paid for it with the loss of their newspaper and years of violence directed at their home.

At a Glance

Born
11 November 1914 (date disputed), Huttig, Arkansas
Died
4 November 1999, Little Rock, Arkansas
Birth name
Daisy Lee Gatson
Known for
Mentor and advocate of the Little Rock Nine (1957–1958); co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press (1941–1959); The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962)
Fields
Civil Rights · Journalism · Organizing
Era
Civil Rights Era

Early Life

Daisy Lee Gatson was born in the sawmill town of Huttig, in southern Arkansas; the usual date given, 11 November 1914, is uncertain. She was raised by foster parents, Orlee and Susie Smith. By her own account in her memoir, she learned as a child that her mother had been sexually assaulted and murdered by three white men, and that no one had been punished; the story, which historians have not been able to document independently, shaped the anger at injustice she described as central to her life.

At about fifteen she met Lucius Christopher (L. C.) Bates, then a traveling salesman based in Memphis, Tennessee, who had earlier worked on newspapers; he would become her partner in both journalism and civil rights work. The couple moved to Little Rock, and in 1941 they founded a weekly newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. They married on 4 March 1942 in Fordyce, Arkansas.

Life and Work

The State Press became one of the most outspoken Black newspapers in the South. It campaigned against police brutality, reporting aggressively on the 1942 killing of a Black soldier, Sergeant Thomas Foster, by a Little Rock police officer, and it covered segregation, poor housing, and discrimination in employment. Daisy Bates wrote for the paper and was named its city editor in 1945.

In 1952 she was elected president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches. After the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v. Board of Education (1954 and 1955), the Little Rock school board adopted a slow plan of desegregation beginning with Central High School in the fall of 1957. Bates worked with the NAACP’s lawyers and helped recruit and prepare the Black students who would enroll.

On 4 September 1957 Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to bar the nine students from entering the school. When they entered on 23 September, a white mob gathered outside and they had to be removed for their safety; on 25 September, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne Division, the Little Rock Nine attended classes under military escort. Throughout the year Bates’s home served as a meeting place for the students and their parents, and she acted as their advocate with school officials, the press, and the national NAACP. In August 1957 a rock was thrown through the front window with a note threatening dynamite, crosses were burned on the lawn, and on 7 July 1958 a bomb exploded in front of the house.

The city of Little Rock arrested Bates in 1957 for refusing to turn over the NAACP’s membership lists under a local ordinance; the U.S. Supreme Court reversed her conviction in Bates v. City of Little Rock (1960), holding that compelled disclosure violated the members’ freedom of association. In 1957 both the Associated Press and the National Council of Negro Women named her a Woman of the Year, and she served on the NAACP’s national board from 1957 to 1970. In 1958 the NAACP awarded its Spingarn Medal jointly to Bates and the Little Rock Nine. The cost was severe: a boycott by white advertisers forced the State Press to close in 1959.

Bates moved to New York and wrote The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962), with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. She was one of the few women who spoke at the March on Washington in August 1963, and during the 1960s she worked on voter registration for the Democratic National Committee. In 1968 she moved to Mitchellville, a small Black community in eastern Arkansas, where she directed an antipoverty program until 1974, securing grants for improvements that included a sewer system and a Head Start program.

Legacy

L. C. Bates died in 1980. In 1984 Daisy Bates revived the Arkansas State Press, operating it until 1988. She died at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock on 4 November 1999; the Arkansas legislature later established Daisy Gatson Bates Day, observed on the third Monday in February. The University of Arkansas Press reissued her memoir in 1987, and it received an American Book Award in 1988.

The Bates home on West 28th Street in Little Rock, which served as the de facto command post of the desegregation effort and as a haven for the nine students, was the daily pickup and drop-off point for the students during the 1957–1958 school year; guarded by volunteers and floodlights after repeated attacks, it is now a National Historic Landmark listed by the National Park Service.

On 8 May 2024 a bronze statue of Bates by Benjamin Victor was unveiled in National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol as one of Arkansas’s two contributions to the collection. Historians of the Little Rock crisis emphasize that it was local Black institutions — the NAACP branch, the Black press, and the students’ families — that sustained the desegregation effort, and Bates stood at the center of all three.

For Educators

Desegregation at Little Rock depended not only on nine students and federal troops but on local organizers like Bates, who supported the students and bore the costs of standing with them. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. c. 1914 Born Daisy Lee Gatson in Huttig, Arkansas.
  2. 1941 With L. C. Bates, founds the Arkansas State Press in Little Rock.
  3. 4 March 1942 Marries L. C. Bates in Fordyce, Arkansas.
  4. 1952 Elected president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches.
  5. 25 September 1957 The Little Rock Nine enter Central High School under federal troop escort.
  6. 1958 Receives the NAACP Spingarn Medal jointly with the Little Rock Nine.
  7. 1959 An advertiser boycott forces the State Press to close.
  8. 1960 Supreme Court rules in Bates v. City of Little Rock.
  9. 1962 Publishes The Long Shadow of Little Rock.
  10. 4 November 1999 Dies in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay, 1962; reprint Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987).
  2. Grif Stockley, Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).
  3. Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Daisy Lee Gatson Bates (1914?–1999).” Link
  4. Architect of the Capitol, “Daisy Bates Statue.” Link
  5. Bates v. City of Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516 (1960).
  6. National Park Service, “Home of Daisy and L. C. Bates.” Link

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Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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